A failure… gone bad #covid19 & #Entrepreneurs

Failure gone bad!

A little more than 4 years ago, we decided to launch a matching platform to let people help entrepreneurs for a little bit of equity. We called that TimeFunding, because basically, we were reinventing sweat-equity: time and know-how against a few shares from the companies people were helping.

We even went to the Valley with this. We joined the Refiners fund and acceleration program. And we failed!

Why? Because we did not have a valid business model. No matter how hard we tried to fix our idea, the project was at best a great “non-profit vision” or most of the time, a sweet dream. And the market, as well as our mentors and advisors were right. Back then.

When the Covid-19 crisis began, no one knew it would lead to a worldwide lockdown. We were all shocked by such a strong contraction of the economy! We had to quickly reinvent our way of seeing the world, our daily routines, our work tools, our understanding of what “working remotely” could really mean… in fact, we were not prepared and maybe some of us never will be!

Very soon, and because we advise and coach so many entrepreneurs these days, lots of them came to us and asked for help: they needed to know more about tools for remote work, they needed advice, sometimes they only needed to talk…

At the same time, a lot of our fellow entrepreneurs were telling us things like: “we have so much time at our disposal, we decided to help others”, or “we jumped at the chance to launch a covid-project”, etc.

Also, a lot of people in France that were forced to stop working for their employer, were really asking what they could do to be of use… some of them turned to us.

About a week ago, we started to see things clearly: our old failed matching platform could come back from the dead and serve a new and strong purpose in these hard times!

This is how we decided to reshape or “pimp” the old TimeFunding platform, thanks to the help of our friends and associates, Sam and Richard, and we launched entrepreneurs-covid19.com within a few days.

We soft launched it 48 hours ago and have already got a hundred matched missions.

We don’t know if this is going to help a lot of people, but at least, it showed us that depending on the timing, a huge failure could become a small success… and if not for us, then for the greater good!

Enjoy https://entrepreneurs-covid19.com, non-profit, free and yours…

(TimeFunding originally involved Pierre-Yves Larvor, Christophe Routhieau, Samantha Saw and Elodie & Nash Hughes. The entrepreneurs-covid19 platform is live thanks to the help of Samantha Saw and Richard N’Dumu)